Why gymnastics is bad

Common Gymnastics Injuries Gymnasts must be both powerful and graceful. More serious, common gymnastics injuries include: Wrist fractures Finger and hand injuries Cartilage damage Anterior cruciate ligament ACL tears Knee and low back pain Spinal fractures and herniated discs Achilles tendon strains or tears Ankle sprains Shoulder instability Colles' fracture Burners and stingers Gymnasts are taught how to fall and land safely to decrease the risk of damage to the spine, head, neck, or wrist.

Evaluation by a medical professional usually is advisable for more severe injuries, such as: Landing in an awkward position Missing her footing on the beam or grip on the bars Feeling pain after practicing a skill over and over Head injuries from a fall can range from mild to severe.

Causes of Gymnastics Injuries Insufficient flexibility Decreased strength in the arms, legs, or core Poor balance Imbalances in strength or flexibility one side stronger than the other Overuse Injuries in Gymnastics Overuse injuries are the result of repetitive movement, often from kicking and turning on one side more than the other. Imbalances in strength or flexibility A gymnast can be a "righty" or "lefty. Preventing Gymnastics Injuries Strength training is good for injury prevention.

It also keeps gymnasts motivated by helping them progress to the next skill level. Having a strong core provides gymnasts with a stable base for the arms and legs as they move in different directions. When the core specifically the transverse abdominis muscle contracts, it decreases the pressure placed on the lumbar spine.

This muscle contracts when you try to draw the belly button toward the spine. Contracting this muscle while performing exercises on a therapy ball or stable surface will strengthen the core. Other good core exercises include planks, bridges, or tuck ups while hanging on the bar. Flexibility imbalances can occur in the thighs, calf muscles, and hips. Performing stretches several times a day and holding each stretch for 30 seconds will make a difference in flexibility.

Mental Training Fear Gymnasts are typically viewed as fearless. Perfection Gymnasts strive for perfection. In , Nassar was sentenced to years in a Michigan state prison after pleading guilty to seven counts of sexual assault of minors, along with an additional 40 to years after pleading guilty to three counts of sexual assault. In many ways, Nassar is the tip of the iceberg, part of a broader, systemic culture in elite gymnastics that includes physical and psychological abuse as well as starvation of young athletes.

Just last week, Terry Gray, a former USA Gymnastics coach who worked in Las Vegas from to , was arrested and charged with 14 counts of lewdness with a child under the age of Gray — who also spent time as a coach in California and Ohio — was suspended by the organization in October after the allegations against him surfaced and an investigation was launched.

As John C. Connecticut Sen. Richard Blumenthal asked then-president of USA Gymnastics Kerry Perry about Gray during a congressional hearing, citing a report suggesting that Gray was unaware of his suspension. But the Karolyi Ranch, where Olympic hopefuls trained for decades, was a harsh and unrelenting proving ground where young athletes were frequently verbally abused about their weight and size, underfed and lied to or misled about the severity of their own injuries.

Mattie Larson, a national team member from to , claims in one episode that after injuring her ankles and being taken to the hospital, she was not allowed to see her own X-rays and was told she had simply suffered a sprain. She was diagnosed with a stress fracture in her right leg ahead of the Olympics, but that diagnosis was intentionally hidden from her by Nassar, who told her teammate Aly Raisman about it instead.

Despite coming off of a knee injury, Nichols finished sixth overall at the Olympic trials, but was included in neither the five-athlete team selection nor as one of the three alternates. I think there were deals that were made under the table. In October , Steve Penny who stepped down as head of USA Gymnastics in was arrested and charged with tampering with evidence in the Nassar case. He pleaded not guilty, and his case is ongoing.

The names, locations and time periods may be different, but the stories are almost identical. Verbal abuse: check. Humiliation: check.

Isolated from the world beyond the sport: check. Continuing to compete with injuries and broken bones: check. Fat-shaming of gymnasts by coaches is a persistent theme pervading the sport. With the fat-shaming come the coping mechanisms. Daily crying: check. Read an essay about gymnastics and life by Michelle Kaeser Hoping to get injured just to avoid training: check. Taking extra risks to increase the chance of injury: check.

Self-harming to get out of training: check. And it gets worse. And these are not isolated incidents. Yet the athletes seldom leave their abusive coaches.

Leaving the coach is like leaving your family, and no child wants that. And so they continue their oppressed lives. After their careers come to an end, some gymnasts share their nightmarish stories.

Or, to put it slightly differently: abuse is baked into the sport itself. The quickest route to success in gymnastics involves a direction in which some sort of abuse is virtually inevitable.

Smaller bodies rotate more easily, so they can do more tricks that yield more points within a shorter time frame. And that means puberty is viewed as an inconvenient, career-ending illness. As you grow taller, wider, rounder — moving towards womanhood, in other words — you become less capable of performing the breathtaking skills it takes to win at that level.

Russian and Romanian gymnastics coaches were the first to figure this out. In the s and s, their early talent development schemes spat out children who could do everything their adult opponents could do — and more. At the Montreal Olympics in , she received the much-coveted highest score: a perfect ten. In almost all other sports, achieving success at such an early age is almost impossible.

In team sports, you need opponents to be able to train and get better, which imposes an organisational constraint on accumulating experience. And for biomechanical reasons, being smaller — younger — is actually an advantage. She may not be practice-happy, but she practises.

This means — crudely put — that if you have enough gymnasts and fit in enough hours of training before the age of 15 or 16, you can have your champion. The average age of successful gymnasts plunged — as did their body height and weight. Those figures plummeted rapidly from that point on: 1.

In gymnastics, they call them pixies. Within that group of very young gymnasts, Belgian researchers revealed in , the smallest, thinnest, lightest girls were the most successful. Those results are also apparent from their birth months.

In most sports, children born in January, February and March are overrepresented in selection teams. Those children are just a bit bigger, stronger, more experienced compared to the younger children born in the later months of the same year. What does it all come down to? The belief that those who shove the most practice hours down the throat of a skinny, late-maturing child gymnast have the best chance of winning.